August 2024

Tesla is famous for its brilliant charging stations. BYD is partnering with Ampol to provide BYD drivers with a similar wide access to charging. I love that a revolution is being built right under peoples’ noses, while they argue it can never happen. Ampol want to be the leading fast-charging location in the country.

A very common sight at the Bathurst Tesla superchargers. No vehicles. It might look like nobody is interested in EVs. But it’s showing the reality of something I post about here. Nearly all EV charging is done at home. The fast-chargers are for people who are travelling, passing through towns. Unlike petrol/diesel, where all trips need to be fuelled via a servo.

Chatted to a senior Long Covid researcher today. Direct quote: “We’re all shitting ourselves.”

Bling is back. Katie Ledecky has POTS. (Has had it for years.) Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Meaning a fast heart rate, dizziness and fatigue when going from lying to standing. Often a chronic after-effect with infection. Many, many people who’ve had Covid develop POTS.

We march on, mindlessly.

There are two men ‘identifying’ as women, in the female boxing at the olympics. Watch the short video to see where this has ended up.

I’m a bloody good swimmer, if I don’t say so myself. But 200 metres of butterfly? I reckon I’d struggle to do 10. Also one truth of physics that you can see in the swim races is that swimmers are always faster when they’re underwater. It’s why they had to introduce the 15 m maximum underwater rule, per lap. If you watch the breaststroke for example, everything above the water is really just coming up for air. Nearly all of the actual movement forward comes when they’re completely underwater.

More chargers opening in NZ. Re-capping the stats I did for Australia about the massive untold story of the shift to EVs. Getting fuel tankers and refineries out of commission. These chargers don’t need fuel tankers to fill them, they’re always ‘full’. Electricity travels at the speed of light, through the grid. 1) 65 million TONNES of imported fuel is transported around the country, every year. Mostly by road. 2) That fuel is transported over 15 BILLION kilometres. 3) There are over 2.6 million tanker journeys every year. That's more than 7200 per DAY, on average. All of that traffic will disappear from our roads. And the enormous amount of fuel, just to transport the fuel (how dumb is that).

The trucks that deliver fuel to service stations in Australia every year use approximately 8 BILLION litres of diesel, just to fuel the tanker trucks. That’s before one drop goes in your tank. When vehicles shift to electric, that number drops from 8 billion litres every year, to zero. Electricity never needs to be delivered, it just comes down the wires.

This team has been the highlight of the games so far for me. They levelled with Argentina with one second to go in this game (Argentina is 2 in the world, Australia is 5). And the result flattered Argentina, Australia missed 2 penalty strokes.

The UK led the global charge to ‘hybrid immunity’, with Covid, arguing that letting everybody get infected over and over would gradually build up population immunity. Immunity to common sense, maybe.

Nissan’s profits dived 99% in a single quarter. The reason? Like other Japanese makers, it’s way behind in building EVs. This is again where getting your news and view of the world from social media completely distorts reality. If you’re a car company and your main focus isn’t EVs, you’re toast. China and Tesla saw all this coming. Any idiot could see it. As combustion carmakers collapse, petrolheads will be reduced to a minor hobbyist community. And that’s fine, but pretending their dominance isn’t over is delusional.

Trump may be entering his ‘Fat Elvis’ phase.

Australian data. You don’t need to be good at maths to see the inevitability of what’s happening. And Australia is slow, this is HALF the rate the rest of the world is growing at. Also accusations of this being some ‘inner city elite thing’ disproved by the data. More people buy EVs in Blacktown than in Bondi. It’s saving them a fortune on long commutes.

The crazy thing is, this difference has existed for nearly 200 years. Electric motors were invented well before combustion motors. Combustion motors were considered a joke when they began. The only reason they ever became dominant is that Rockefeller flooded the world with cheap oil, to power them. And all the complexity and they still rarely get to even 40% efficiency, most often 30. Loud, inefficient, filthy, complicated, gutless. Complete rubbish. And then you stil haven’t even connected them to the wheels, which run in a completely different direction, creating even more inefficiencies and mechanical stresses.

Sheep love windmills, if they could vote it wouldn’t be for Barnaby.

Thanks to Jason for this one. This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittifaction, which has happened to search and is central to social media as well. It’s a bait-and-switch, you’re offered something you want to get you to use it (search, networking with friends) - that’s the bait, the LHS of the diagram below. Then the switch happens, where your data is sold to advertisers and companies. The platforms then do the same thing to the advertisers and companies too.

The smoke-filled room experiment I think is one all people should know. Because this is the principle that runs all of our lives. Have a watch, it’s short. We think that the peer pressure of school is left behind in adult life. It absolutely isn’t. Everything from Covid to climate change, renewables and EVs is currently being transacted using this same social behaviour. @[562037124:2048:Jason], you’ll see at the end that the artist participant *almost* succeeds! Almost.

‘Where were you when this revolution happened, mum/dad?’ ‘Um, I was on social media posting fake facts about electric cars catching fire and running out of charge.’ Soak up the revolution. Don’t look back in regret that you were the wally arguing that the Earth is flat.

My favourite team of the Games. Still winning. Hockey is so thrillingly fast that you need about a dozen slow motion replays to understand what’s happened in a particular incident.

Tesla’s quicksilver colour, with black alloy wheels, is easy on the eye. You can buy one of these for much less than the cost of a wankpanzer ute. And it’ll need no servicing, no fuel, and win you every green light take-off.

"It's probably the worst week of my life in terms of how my body is, and that's no exaggeration," he said. "Everything's come at once. Since COVID, it's just every day waking up with a different thing. The medical team's been brilliant."

Tesla do brilliant software, this is just one small analysis the Powerwall does. Showing how much money we haven’t needed to pay for electricity since installing solar + Powerwall in December 2022. On track to pay off the panels in under 3 years. Battery in 7-8. Lifetime of the system = 25+ years. That’s a lot of years of pure profit, and also increased cash flow for the entire 25+ years. Nothing else gives you this sort of ROI.

One more slice and dice from the Powerwall. ‘Solar offset’ is how much your solar has offset your home energy usage. In our case, it’s provided almost twice what the house needed (with Spring and Summer still to come, which will easily tip it past that). The rest has been sold back to the grid.

People find my posts about Daylight Saving amusing. Like somebody yelling at clouds. But right now I'm living what I do every year, with this circadian rhythm cluster bomb. Before the clocks changed to end DST, I was sleeping beautifully. Now I've had a couple of months of totally disrupted sleep. Tired every day. Now the mornings are getting a bit brighter, but in October we'll all be plunged back into winter-levels of morning darkness again, just as our bodies had started to readjust to the Spring. Which will fuck up the rhythms again, for the second time in the year.

Count the fingers on Trump's right hand.

Bat damage being repaired in the rest of the park.

Enjoy the revolution that will be spoken about for centuries. Don't miss it in social media bubbles.

What we now call mental illness (a terrible term) used to be called nervous illness. I much prefer that term because most garden variety mental illness is really a type of nervous exhaustion. Even people feeling ‘stressed’ a lot are on this same continuum, it’s persistent stress that can lead to more difficult nervous illness, like anxiety and depression. Claire Weekes was an astounding Australian doctor, who revolutionised the understanding of how to treat nervous exhaustion. She was a terrible sufferer herself, and it was a conversation with a solider back from the war that made a light bulb go off for her. This book has literally saved lives, around the world. Weekes (died 1990) is an international superstar of nervous illness. I’d recommend this book to everybody, as above we all feel stress at times, and this book is a wonder for how to feel calm in a stressful world.

In the 1970s, there were over 20,000 servos in Australia. In the year 2000, there were 8370. Now there are only 6400. It’s important to understand this. You don’t get rich running a servo. The big reduction in number of servos has come from rationalising them into mega-servos, with more bowsers, pumping a lot more fuel from single locations. Current projections say up to 80% of what’s left will be bankrupt by 2035. It’s why you’ll see electric chargers and more retail added to servos, very fast now, they’re trying to change the business model, to survive. And as EVs will charge from home more than 90% of the time, whereas all petrol and diesel driving needs a regular trip to the servo, it’s increasingly only going to be passing through-traffic that will even bother using one. We all have our own servos at home already, for EVs. They’re called power points.

People think Covid is over because they’re lied to. Every day. Data is suppressed, no testing is done, nobody tracks the avalanche of pneumonias and whooping coughs and flus back to trashed immune systems, caused by Covid. Hundreds of athletes infected by Covid at this Games. We’re not getting more immune, to anything. We’re destroying the health of an entire society.

In China, more than 60% of EVs are already cheaper than petrol and diesel cars. Outside China governments are in bed with old car manufacturers and oil companies, who fund social media campaigns that get millions to believe they’re better off driving something that costs $2/litre to run, needs regular servicing, is gutless, makes the air filthy and fills towns and cities with unrelenting noise.

As the Pythons say, I like Chinese.

Alex.

Hunter Valley. Because windmills spoil the view in the countryside.

My mate Satoshi, doing rounds in Sydney amidst the Covid wreckage of peoples' bodies. People don't change behaviour until it's much too late to save themselves. Then they launch a GoFundMe.

Bathurst like many places is about to decide whether to let FB groups run the town. I can't comment on Bathurst specifically, but in general terms I wouldn't let social media run a chocolate wheel.

The Tesla app, part of the car section. Defrost mode gives you a heated car with defrosted windscreen, turned on from the house. Bioweapon defence mode turns on HEPA filtering of outside air (good for bushfires or heavy city traffic). Camp mode is obviously for camping. Dog mode is for leaving the dog or older kids in the car, maintaining a temperature while also giving a camera view of the interiror of the car. Suzanne, used any of these?

Our kids have always had zero interest in alcohol. And only a passing interest in cars and driving. These are different times, which we too often see through the lens of the old. Trying to force rites of passage from a different age, onto the young, to deny our own ageing.

One of the main architects of mass death from Covid in Australia. You can see his libertarian bullshit here, about freedom and vaccines. You know what was mandated for all Australians, because of people like him? Infections. Lots and lots of repeated infections.

Nick is an extremely successful billionaire venture capitalist. Not a Greenie.

List of special rate variations approved in NSW in the 2023-24 period. There have been 7 more Councils since. The basic services people want and need have to be paid for.

Some US States now making the wearing of a mask for protection illegal. That's how far the lunatics running our asylums are going now to enforce 'living with' Covid.

That's just those who bother to test. That's also the total number of atletes infected, from ALL countries, at the Tokyo games.

Important to understand this story. Firstly it doesn't mean people are buying petrols or diesels instead. Like the rest of the world, they're buying hybrids. 'Range anxiety' has them spooked, they want an EV, but are worried about range. Range anxiety is a mental illness, not a problem with EVs. Can I offer advice? Don't buy a hybrid, if you want an EV. I have 2 hybrids, and while they're superb cars, I bought them because there were no battery EVs available at the time. I'd swap them for battery EVs every day of the week, once you taste the genius of an electric motor, you'll want that petrol part gone ASAP. Because Australians buy so many Japanese cars, and Japanese car makers have been hopelessly slow at changing to EVs, they're flooding the market with hybrids (which they are very good at making), to try to keep sales. But they're planning to dump them too, don't be fooled. Behind the scenes they're in a panic, madly re-tooling to change to EVs. The great news is this will force even more discounting on battery EVs, as the article says. Bargains galore coming our way. And remember the savings get even bigger after purchase, with no fuel costs and little to no servicing. https://thedriven.io/2024/08/05/ev-sales-slump-in-australia-in-july-prompting-the-new-round-of-electric-price-wars/?fbclid=IwY2xjawEfuk9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRvxC9uDGzgHQQbiS5fsNVdTksj1j8eNid98Hrystzrir1t4vNjQQFk7wQ_aem_YC9jDviwF49jHOj9htmy3A

Just about every usage of the word narcissist is like Alanis Morissette’s use of the word ironic. Nothing of the sort. 

Europe, like the rest of us, has no young people. There are no solutions for this. We're not paying attention.

The best EVs currently available are in the medium car part of the market. Tesla Model 3 and Y, and the BYD Seal. You can see how EVs are smashing all opposition there. BYD mid-sized SUVs will start to add even further to that segment. Once small and large vehicles are readily available as EVs too, it’s game over for ICEs. There are actually quite a few smaller EVs, just not as well marketed and historically without the same discounts. But that’s changing fast. You can see that where EVs are available, people are leaving petrol and diesel at speed.

Eric is one of the most respected medical voices in the US. Here he states the obvious, which people still refuse to hear. We’re into the 5th year of the pandemic, and doing nothing at all to control it. And people think they can just let it ride, and get on with life. That’s because public knowledge of infectious disease is zero. The virus is coming for all of us.

The NSW Government is the worst in the country for cosy deals with big donors, like property developers. In this case, commercial property owners, who are losing money because so many employees now work from home. As they should. https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/nsw/2024/08/07/wfh-nsw-chris-minns?ahe=662efd944398edbb2d8f4d85736c4bb830fa6116abf076eb6d8317fd70698f95&acid=3260892&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020240808&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra&lr_hash=

Did you know Australia is having a warmer than average winter?

How does it feel to be part of that blue line?

Freddie Mercury was an Asian rock star. His family was from India. In a lot of photos this isn't obvious, but in others it's unmissable. Part of his genius was to hide both his sexuality and his ethnicity, in an Anglo rock world that at the time had little tolerance for either gay or Asian people. Freddie Mercury was a character he created, with such force of presence that it bypassed peoples' usual critical framings completely. Those who knew him often remarked how shy and introverted he was off stage. He literally became a rock star to become accepted in the world, and not only that but to take control over it. The tragedy of his early death was him managing to pull off this incredible feat, only to collide with a pandemic. Paul McCartney said once fame is a way a person feels validated. All of our lives are about belonging.

Machattie pruning ploughing ahead. Big job.

Ryan is a professor of evolutionary biology. I think these are interesting for people to see, because he’s addressing two pieces of propaganda in this pandemic. One that just letting ourselves become infected over and over will make Covid more mild, as we ‘build our immunity’. (Absolutely false.) The other being that ‘humans have always lived with respiratory viruses’. Also absolutely false. They arrived when we started living in buildings, not very long ago in evolutionary terms. We have no evolved resistance to them. Unlike bats.

So many ‘estatic’ people at these Olympics. Maybe pacifically estatic. With lightening.

What happens when you exert yourself with Covid. Your GP may not tell you, but if you have Covid, avoid all heavy exercise for at least 6-8 weeks. As for doing the heavy exercise WITH Covid? Insanity. This is quite possibly myocarditis.

Estatic results.

Wonderful depth and light.

BYD have updated the Seal. Major changes to the charging (from a 400V to 800V platform, which will significantly increase charging speed), addition of new semi-autonomous driving features, and a new flash interior. And in true modern Chinese engineering fashion, they did all of that and are now asking even LESS for the car. (The headline is ridiculous. There’s a very small decrease in range due to a slightly smaller battery, barely noticeable.)

Housing is unaffordable because governments stopped building public housing, through ideologies of ‘the market’ doing it instead. The market will never build affordable housing, how many people have you met who don’t try to maximise the returns from real estate? Similarly the problem isn’t one of ‘supply’. Nobody will accept flooding the market with cheap houses, driving everybody’s prices down, who believes this crap? The graph gives the obvious answer.

Remember the fight over the NBN in Australia? That was entirely Tony Abbott trying to protect Foxtel, for his mate Rupert. Murdoch knew the NBN would open the door to streaming platforms into Australian homes, directly undermining Foxtel’s business. So we got Abbott’s crap NBN. It didn’t save Foxtel, which I have and enjoy, but it’s way too expensive now and doesn’t offer anything that others don’t, for much less money. Another positive may be the demise of the ‘SKY at Night’ cast of whining old men who exert far too much influence on Australian politics.

Parents doing this. Kids as products to be sold. I’m well aware that pretty much everything I post to social media isn’t the sort of thing people log on to see. Imagine turning your own life into a product. Even those who don’t go to these extremes are still uploading and living their personal lives, through these platforms. Social media platforms are not public life. But they’ve become that. They’re the extension of high school culture, to all life. It’s why we’re not fighting pandemics or climate change, and why obvious changes to energy and transportation have to fight to be heard. You’re more likely to get selfies in front of Covid corpses than you are to see anything done to stop the pandemic. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-09/instagram-meta-monetised-child-influencer-account-ban/104190956?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

Suncalc.org is a fantastic site for tracking the sun’s movement during the year. Critical if you’re planning solar panels and your roof isn’t straightforward, for example if it has shade in a given direction. You can see the lowest sun path in winter in the top arc, and the highest is the bottom arc. The yellow band between them shows all the paths the sun takes over a given address during the year. You enter your property location and it tells you the exact path of the sun on any day, and location at any point in time. There’s a huge street tree to our north-west, that blocks late afternoon sun in winter. With suncalc I can track to the exact day when that shading starts and ends, every year.

Harry is a cardiovascular surgeon, David is one of Australia’s Covid experts. This is what happens when you exercise with or soon after Covid. That’s ventricular tachycardia. Only a pacemaker will save him.

Losing to Switzerland in beach volleyball. Who doesn’t enjoy a great Swiss beach? Commentators described the Swiss team as ‘calm as a cucumber.’ Estatic.

Nick Cave is not a genius. It’s funny that he thought he was. He’s a very common popular music type, he’s ‘cool’. Just high school life imported into music. The cool at school are nearly always morons and bullies with no talent for anything. I don’t think Cave is a moron or a bully. But he’s a very ordinary musician.

I don’t like people of good will being mocked. But it’s silly to call this misogyny. The worst mockery of Raygun I saw came from other women. Sometimes something is just bad, and gets called out.

Had to do a quick run Into Sydney yesterday, and always find being on the roads gives some of the best insights into human behaviour. Like these newer adjustable speed limits. A great idea, when they monitor traffic across a wide area, they can adjust speed limits to try to get the best flow. What did most drivers do with these yesterday, on the M4? Completely ignored them. In a 100 zone that had been dropped to 60 because of congestion ahead, people flew around me still doing 100, swerving between cars trying to do the right thing. This is like working in governance. Most won’t do the right thing, unless they’re forced to. Everybody is a righteous little ball of certainty that their way is all that matters. We sometimes call China and Russia ‘authoritarian’ cultures. But that’s just because our own culture is a teenage culture, where we want infinite ‘freedom’ to do anything we want. We’re just immature. China and Russia enforce strict rules because they have centuries of experience in what happens if you don’t. Our little adolescent fantasy culture is barely 50 years old. And collapsing. If you don’t believe me, ask me some time what choice notes members of the public leave Council staff, after Council meetings.

It’s an interesting and popular idea, that our problems are caused by too much negativity, and those problems would be fixed if we were all more positive. Even the idea that talking about problems is a negative thing, rather than just doing what humans have always done, talked about things. One of the most inspiring and fun things about being human is the complex and not always pleasant varieties of our experience. As if the baseline for life is permanent and perpetual fun, which must be rescued by forced happiness if things go wrong. Like thinking a flat tyre is fixed by being happy about your flat tyre. A filter or window for life that assesses everything according to mood, rather than realities. Like customers at a tourist resort, awarding 1-5 stars based on how satisfied they are by life. Passive recipients of existence, rather than an active engagement in life’s complexity.

It turns out the noise from combustion clunkers is in the top 10 turn-offs. Bit surprised people speeding up to stop others overtaking them didn’t even make the top 10.

Great honest assessment after nearly 100,000 km of driving a Model Y, from somebody who isn’t a Tesla fan. Notably, obviously zero fuel costs, except cheap home electricity. And not one service or repair needed, in nearly 100,000 km. With a battery still at 90% of as-new capacity. https://youtu.be/XSTvZhJXffY?si=HwKHAjaRi-urPyAj

I guess I can safely say that I’m clearly not sharing this denial. I get more or less zero traction with just about every person I work with and know, in trying to warn that the pandemic never ended, and never got less serious. You can’t live with a pandemic. It will destroy us. Even the Bible says it. We’ve lost our minds, and our collective memories.

The breakdancing made me think. Those who either aren’t good at dancing, or have no experience at it, often feel too intimidated to do it for fear of ridicule. Modern social dancing has no structure at all, which is terrible for people like that, it’s like telling somebody who wants to learn the piano to get up on stage with an experienced band and just start improvising, before they even know where Middle C is. Their friends will say ‘don’t worry, nobody looks or cares’. But they do. And they laugh. It’s a great example of how the removal of certain formal structures in life, in this case any sort of structure to dances, was sold as a freedom but actually disempowers people. When you watch much older dances, say in period dramas, what stands out is how they were precisely designed to scaffold people into a relationship in movement. Good dancers could take that structure and improvise all they liked. By removing all of the structure, only the naturally gifted are really comfortable.

I'm not sure how well known it is that when you get an infectious disease, the symptoms you feel aren't caused by the disease. They're caused by your own immue system. The celebration that people have of getting a 'mild' case of Covid for example can be misguided, it may mean your immune system just let the virus in, without fighting it much. This research showed it. People with HIV of course have very weak immune systems. What sort of Covid response do they get? Very mild. Covid is a total bastard, forcing our bodies to put out a welcome mat so that it can invade, and nobody cares because they only felt 'mildly' ill. People who get HIV also tend to only feel mildly ill. Until they're dead 8-10 years later, if they don't get drugs. There are no similar drugs for Covid.

Immortalised! By accident. The new Centennial Park in Bathurst. Right at the front of that group of kids saying hello to the elephant are Mike and me, twins in Kindergarten. 1973.

Donald is the best. Just ask him.

The new trains look very flash and will have more functionality. But these old silvers really stood the test of time. Still extremely comfortable and quiet. I was amused to see a US city proclaiming its first ever electric train, these have been electric for decades. It’s why they’re so nice to ride in. You don’t get the shudder or shaking of a diesel (or in the old days steam) trying to gently get up to speed, while spewing out the black smoke which often makes its way into the cabin. Just a flexible application of maximum torque at any speed to meet requirements, from 0 km/h, which is what electric motors do.

I’m a big believer that the world will be a better place not by targeting our emotions. Like being more nice to each other. It will be a better place only when we do more thoughtful things. Even the most basic things. Working with people whose job it is to clear blocked sewer lines a case in point. Only 3 things should go down a toilet. Your number 1’s and 2’s, and toilet paper. That’s it. Nothing else. Try being the person for a day who has to clear this mess up in the sewers. Our societies become fractious through the accumulation of thoughtless things. That causes us to clash, creating ‘negative’ emotions. To fix those, you don’t add fake positive emotions. You stop doing thoughtless things. You bloody think.

We're going to see more of this, car companies also offering charging options. Tesla of course has its own superchargers. This is clever, subsidising home charging instead. Much cheaper and easier for the company. Free driving, how's that sound people? "The program enables Ford EV drivers to charge their vehicles at home for free between 7 pm and 1 pm the next day. It’s offered year-round and gives drivers an 18-hour window to charge for free."

Just look at this. There is no such thing as a better or more authentic travel. I'm sure most of the thousands of people trashing this place are good people. The problem is travel itself, the whole idea of it. Like saying you need to shag every person you meet, to 'experience' them. Shag one person. Look at pictures of the rest. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2024/aug/12/tourists-engulf-montenegros-adriatic-gem-in-pictures

It’s disingenuous to say to young people today that their parents also had high house repayments. The relative price of houses between then and now is literally chalk and cheese. The fabled ‘we paid 17% interest rates’ was a handful of years only, at the end of the 1980s (red circle). That was 17% of a MUCH smaller mortgage loan, and for only 3-4 years. Look at what happened to house prices from the turn of the century. That’s a quarter of a century now of completely unaffordable mortgages. Housing is the great swindle we’re pulling on younger people, a genuine disaster. And the astronomical capital gains from those skyrocketing prices have gone predominantly to older generations. Meanwhile if the young go to university, we slap tens of thousands more onto their debt balances. (Remembering most older Australians got their uni for free.) And we have so few young people now that they’re going to be expected to fund and care for us older Australians as we go into retirement as well, but there won’t be even a fraction of the workforce needed available to do it. The whole thing is a powder keg ready to blow. There is only one solution, and it’s deeply unpopular. Older Australians are going to have to pay more for the things they need, through re-direction of our massive retirement savings (all hugely taxpayer subsidised) into paying for social services. Including waiving university debts for students, which will need to come at the expense of other spending priorities, for the old. And the gold-standard health care older Australians expect is going to need a LOT more money, which won’t be able to come from taxpayers - there aren’t enough of them, and they already have unaffordable mortgages and uni debts. And none of that fixes the workforce problems. The entire world is desperately short of young workers.

This is Jonnie Irwin. People who watch UK lifestyle shows will recognise him. Jonnie died earlier this year of lung cancer, aged 50. Had 3 very young boys. I mention it because many assume lung cancer is only about smokers (he wasn't I believe) and is on the way out. In fact the incidence of lung cancer is increasing. The most likely culprit? The particulate shit petrol and diesel cars add to the air, and wood fires. Over 7 million people worldwide die every year because of that air pollution, from that crap technology. That's more than were killed in the Holocaust. Every YEAR. EVs are not just about climate change. I run air purifiers in the house, with the neighbours' wood fires and nearby road. Cheap to buy and run, beats lung cancer. My dad had lung cancer too.

Just to stress again, there will never be nuclear power in Australia in our lifetimes. And there's no intention to actually build it. https://reneweconomy.com.au/agl-hails-performance-of-first-big-battery-says-waiting-for-nuclear-would-put-it-out-of-business/

If oil companies were confident in the future of petrol and diesel, they'd be flooding the world with cheap fuel right now, to encourage people to buy more petrol and diesel vehicles, to obstruct the take-up of EVs. But they're charging historically outrageous prices. They know the game is up. They're making as much money out of us as they can, while they invest in renewables behind the scenes.

I wasn’t sure whether to be more interested in the spelling, or the offer to live in the store.

The SES food must be bad.

Monkeypox is still there.

You can check who your candidates are for the upcoming local government elections here, in NSW: https://elections.nsw.gov.au/elections/local-government-elections/2024-nsw-local-government-elections#accordion-who-are-the-candidates I think it’s important to point out from a governance point of view, whether it’s federal, State or local government, elected leaders don’t ‘run’ the country/State/town. Their role is to be the community liaison point. Their officials run things, thousands of them with specific expertise. When elected leaders attack officials, that’s called populism. What that means is that societies end up not run at all. Which is why things are now such a mess.

Happy birthday sir!

This is what monkeypox (now called mpox) looks like. The new strain in Africa has been declared a global health emergency. Fatality rate much higher than Covid, as an example (and Covid is our 3rd leading cause of death). Women and children particularly affected.

A good word to get to know. Right now we're in a syndemic of Covid, bird flu and monkeypox. This is what 'living with' infectious disease means. Dying.

I think the term 'Long Covid' is far too timid. It basically means 'Covid trashing your entire body, until you die an early death.' Your chances of getting Long Covid increase hugely with each new infection. https://montreal.citynews.ca/2024/08/14/montreal-man-with-long-covid-seeks-medical-assistance-in-dying/amp/

Politics is really personal in the US, hey Alex and Trey?

All of the things described as problems in this article are the things I use to remove our energy costs completely. Smart meters rock (I asked to have one years ago). Time of use rates rock. A home battery gives you the options to tailor everything to suit you. Buy when it’s cheap (or generate yourself with solar), use when it’s expensive. You can do that with a battery even if you don’t have or want solar.

This compassionate and caring approach will actually make anxiety and panic worse. What would have been much better is Nate being encouraged to continue, accepting the feelings of panic, perhaps with one of the other presenters joining him on the floor. Anxiety and panic are the (baseless) fear of fear. By calmly accepting the feelings while not responding to them, your calm mind will restore a calm body. Or as Claire Weekes used to say, ‘wait on no mood’.

If this spreads widely, you'll be able to spot the anti-vax loons by the presence of weeping pustules all over their bodies. The ones who survive, anyway. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/15/mpox-variant-clade-i-case-sweden

Nothing will set off the loons faster than a combination of EVs, and them being ASIAN. The terror! The comments are hilarious. Channel 7 being part of the jingoistic sewer culture of modern Straya even calls it an 'invasion' to settle people down.

You can see here that in 1916 it was only Rockefeller's cheap oil that knee-capped an obvious technology. It's taken us a century to come to our senses. It costs trillions to drill and refine and transport oil, to get it into cars. It costs almost nothing to generate electricty, and even less to transport it through some wires.

Can anybody think of an event where thousands of people mixed recently, including people from Africa? 🤔

Covid numbers on the rise again, after only a short dip. Many are the same people infected in June-July, being reinfected.

A lot of people still don’t get this. We’re using by far our least common form of driving, long-distance trips (and towing) as the model for fuelling cars. Nearly all the driving we do is not that. EVs can already do both, but for nearly all the driving people do, they will never need a fast-charger.

When I say people never leave high school, I mean that the social models we learn there are what shape all adult life as well. At least now. And that model is the constant battle for status. Which is really the battle to belong, in groups. To feel noticed, and wanted. And thus to have a recognised identity. All of life, literally all of it, can be explained by this model. For example I post a lot about EVs. I’m not obsessed with them, I target them for social reasons. Cars (and motorbikes) have always been the way many define their identity, particularly those who never had a good relationship with knowledge or schools. (Remember in Grease, how the ‘bad’ kids were the kids who built hot-rods.) So I talk about EVs, because it’s that group in society who are now our greatest obstruction to important change. The group social media and politicians have mobilised, to obstruct change. To them, EVs represent an existential threat to their group, and therefore their identity. Here’s a story from Cook’s voyages showing the same mechanism. Sailors of that time often died of scurvy (lack of vitamin C). But it was hard to carry enough fresh food as a source of vitamin C. Sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, keeps for ages and is a good source. Cook ordered tonnes of it. But his men didn’t want sauerkraut. Eating any sort of vegetables was rare then. So what did Cook do? He ordered it only be served to himself and his senior officers. The other men then saw this as a high-status meal. And demanded it for themselves.

Ask your GP to prescribe Metformin if you have Covid. Many will resist it, because they’re lazy and do no professional reading. It’s about the only thing that works against Covid, and creates an enormous 41% reduction in risk of developing Long Covid. It also costs only $10 for 100 tablets. Take the paper with you if it helps: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2823%2900299-2

When I first started posting about travel here I think it probably sounded deranged. But now stories like this are everywhere. Travel culture is turning the world into theme parks. It destroys locations, as locals become servants to the tourists, and can’t even afford to live in their own countries. The entire livelihood of a place becomes dependent upon running your entire city or country as a permanent theme park. As the image tourists come to see. When the tourists get bored and move on to new places to ‘see’, it leaves the places ruined.

Just one of a huge numbers of ways you can slice and dice your energy use, with the Tesla battery software. You can see the clear increase in use (blue) in the winter, with heating. And the clear decline in solar generation over the winter months (yellow). Even after a long, dark winter, we’ve still produced more energy than we’ve used, in 2024. That surplus will take off even further now in the Spring and summer. The surplus pays for any excess winter use, with money to spare (pure profit). Some get anxious about declining feed-in tariffs, the rate you sell it back to the grid. By far the biggest savings though are replacing grid electricty (at 25-40c/kWh) for your own use, with solar (0c/kWh).

This is true.

I do wonder if most young Americans even know what the Soviet Union was. Most politics is male, pale and stale old men trying to scare their own generation. (Look at Dutton going back to bashing migrants again, like a dog returning to its own vomit.) But their generation is dying, and is already no longer the majority.

Many imagine extraterrestrial input for engineering wonders like the pyramids. But really it’s just navvies. Labourers. A team of 25 navvies in the Victorian era could dig a hole the size of an olympic swimming pool, using nothing but picks and shovels, in a day.

FB’s resemblance to the old social pages and classifieds of local newspapers hides its danger. All social media platforms are lethally dangerous to societies, because our beliefs are backwards. We don’t get that being social is a *violent* activity, by definition. The more we connect societies, the more violent they will become. Sociality is forming an identity as part of a group. That group will then clash with other groups, in the battle for social status.

He is a convicted felon. Nobody gives a shit that he doesn’t like it.

Covid is evolving to defeat everything our immune systems and vaccines throw at it. Any pathogen you don't make any attempt to control will do that. We're lemmings walking off a cliff. (And it's not a FLiRT variant, for anybody who cares about the technicalities. It's DeFluqe.)

Cricketers today remind me of the boomers in the 1960s. All noble ideals, while in reality gorging themselves on the proceeds of the fire sale of institutions developed over centuries. Leaving the game/society a smoking ruin behind them.

They have no intention of ever building a nuclear power station, anywhere. It's just a way to pretend to care about climate change, while still burning coal. And turning farmers into zombies screaming at windmills so they'll vote for Bananaby again, whom they despise. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/20/coalition-peter-dutton-nuclear-power-policy-renewables-comment

The loud anti-windmill voices in Oberon are determined to protect the views of this pristine landscape.

Oprah led the world in making everything about ‘me’. Here she pays tribute to Phil Donahue by posting a photo that obscures him behind her, while hitching a ride on the publicity around his death with a story about herself.

Social media is such a sewer, that in 14 Council areas they couldn’t even get enough people to run. They see the all-out assault elected people receive, from social media mobs. I know fine people in our own areas who didn’t bother to run, for the same reason. These platforms need to be shut down. They’re destroying our societies, and we’re addicted to them because they seduce us with what we can’t resist - spying on other peoples’ lives, in a constant battle for social status.

The dirty unspoken truth of social media is one we don’t want to admit. Like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where the character spends his days spying on other peoples’ lives through the windows of his apartment. That’s what social media’s attraction is. Sanctioned voyeurism. If you hid outside somebody’s house and peered through the windows, you’d be arrested. But you don’t need to, their lives are now livestreamed. By them. We queue up to be spied on. We love exhibiting ourselves, to others. We put on a show. Hitchcock’s movie made today would have the neighbours decorating their apartments with the latest fashions, while adjusting their make up and poses, smiling for the camera.

Living with the virus.

Is your town about to be run by a Facebook group? Do you know the actual beliefs of the founders of that group? Do you think a FB group has any idea how to run a town? Has the group’s success been just slagging off the local council? All questions I think people need to ask themselves, urgently. Many of these FB groups are direct offshoots of Trump’s US operation. These are extremely dangerous times.

Happy Birthday to this perennial smiler. In a world full of stupid bossy people, and weak smart people, Kell is that rare smart bossy person. Those people will save the world. We love ya, even though you’re old.

Another leading US doctor, showing how Australia went from leading the world in public health, to being its arse-end, in under 2 years. We're doing NOTHING for Covid in Australia, sickening the entire population for the rest of their lives. The majority of Australians haven't had *any* Covid vaccine, in more than 2 years. Let alone two boosters per year. And people on this idiot 'living your best life' platform will still tell you Covid is over.

We've only just started scratching the surface of what Chinese industry has for us. This is an absolute boon for Australians, we'll get these cars for tens of thousands less than the Europeans and Americans, whose governments are slapping huge tariffs on them to protect their car industries.

@[23911136:2048:Trey], Texas stil kicking goals. Texas, oil country! Australians should be ashamed.

Another mystery Scoob! Also don’t get too excited by the ‘here’s why’ in the headline. The article comes up with no why, because the ‘experts’ they talk to don’t know their arses from their elbows. Covid is why.

We habitually ‘hold’ our breath. Breathing is in many ways the key indicator of our overall health. Modern medicine is completely silent on how to help a person breathe well. It will treat the symptoms of poor breathing. The key to breathing well is to let it happen all by itself. Much easier said than done. We have to give up the idea that we DO the breathing. Breathing is an automatic process, and a process that reflects our degree of engagement with the world around us. Breathing in physical terms is air being PUSHED into your lungs, by atmospheric pressure. Not you ‘sucking’ it in. It’s then pushed out of your body again by the elastic rebound of your body, your ribs and diaphragm and everything connected to them (which is all the rest of you). When I say people ‘hold’ their breath, it means interference in any of this automatic process. So how do you let this all work well? By not trying to do any of it. Take your attention out into what you’re doing, and keep it there. Don’t be inside your body trying to hold yourself up, or release tension, or doing ‘deep breathing’, or stretching. None of that. Just pay attention to what you’re doing, out in the world. That will give you the most profound deep breathing, and excellent health.

The origins of local government are fascinating. it wasn’t invented as some way to give local people a voice, or any of that other democracy claptrap. It was mostly invented to control disease. It’s a public health body. It collects your garbage, so you and your neighbours aren’t stewing in it. It removes your sewage (enough said). It provides clean water. It regulates the sanitation of food businesses. It removes stormwater. Etc.

Jordon Steele-John on radio this morning outraged at changes to the NDIS. The example he gave was a deaf person no longer being able to order a bespoke washing machine (through the NDIS) that will notify them via hearing aid when the washing is done. This is the sort of nonsense that will destroy wider community support for the NDIS if they don't start to get real. If you're not sure if the washing machine is finished, go and look. It's what everybody does. They're deaf, not physically unable to check the washing machine.

Herzlichen Gluckwunsch zum Geburtstag Reinhard! Have a wonderful day. Nick and family

Spot what makes the Irwins a smart family.

"...long COVID symptoms in children are tangible, pervasive, wide ranging." We're really fucking up the kids. All so we can go to gigs and fly to Bali. This will play out over decades, a completely avoidable catastrophe.

If you've had Covid, you can play symptom bingo. Red is prevalence of symptoms after 6 months, yellow is 1 year, blue 2 years.

Solar panels will last 25-40 years. At least. Don’t put them on a roof that might last 5 years.

Hey there, happy birthday!

It’s an excellent time to buy a used EV. Don’t be scared by big price drops for secondhand EVs, these are because the price of new EVs is plummeting too. Secondhand petrol or diesel vehicles hold their value more because new petrols and diesels are always more expensive than the model before. It’s an artefact of you being ripped off for new cars.

I watched (livestream) the meet the candidates session at the RSL club this week, for the local elections. Many repeated the line often that there needs to be more ‘consultation’ with the community. The thing as a governance person I want to warn the actual community about, is to not mistake social media groups, for ‘the community’. Social media groups are very good at generating fast visibility, and often speak as if they are the community. They absolutely aren’t. We saw the same thing with Covid lockdowns. The protests against those were driven by a tiny number of Australians. But they made a lot of loud noise, and that fooled politicians and others into thinking that was the voice of the community. Many of these groups have extreme views, which they hide from members. Many are sponsored and organised by extreme organisations overseas. For example some of our prominent local FB groups have clear ties to the Trump political movement in the US. Some are organised by secret services in Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, to disrupt Western democracies.

One for the ‘Covid is over’ people. Testing is back. Covid will not be over until we stop it spreading. Until we control it. Like we do all other serious infectious diseases.

I’m a big supporter of the NDIS. But unless something changes, it will collapse in less than a decade. https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/ndis-cost-could-blow-out-to-125b-a-year-20240118-p5eye5

‘Bots’ on social media. All automatic, software-driven, to generate insta-crowds with preferred opinions. EV posts have lots of these too.

As a culture we decided going to gigs was more important than public health. Karma is arriving quickly now.

The reason Australians will be getting unbelievable bargains on Chinese cars is that they have enormous industrial capacity, but their own domestic market is full. Thus the big push on now for exports. These are fantastic cars, at astonishing prices. The new BYD Seal for example is incredible, and tens of thousands less than you’d pay for the same quality from Audi or BMW. The original was already incredible.

This shows the projected average payout to participants in the NDIS, through their lives. A gross amount on average *per person* of $2.63 million. There are now over 660,000 people on the NDIS (this was 2022 data). That number is projected to at least double, in the next 10 years, and some disability advocates are arguing that it should encompass the more than 4 million Australians classified as disabled. The net figure of $1.17 million per person takes into account other services that the NDIS replaces. But the actuarial analysis points out that these aren’t falling away in the way that was promised, nor are many transitioning from the NDIS into more independent lives, which was also the intent. The total projected cost of the NDIS, just for the current number of participants, is over a trillion dollars over their lifetimes. And that number of participants is expected to at least double, in only a few years, and some argue to increase that number by a further 400%. The whole thing is going to collapse.

Cold again in the coming week, which will make us forget this.

The ‘outback’ is a mythology Australians love. It’s a myth. We’ve always used the land outside the main cities as either a big farm or big mine. Extractive industries. We’re a settler culture, ferrying resources back to the cities. Once the extractive industry goes, the town dies. Then we try to hang on with tourism. Tourists in our own land! You can’t give a clearer example of having no connection to the land than wandering through it ‘seeing the sights’.

Adult life has the same structure (now) as teenage school life. We’re all looking for status, in a group of some kind. To be recognised, accepted, and admired. Tell somebody their favourite band sucks and watch how much it’s part of their identity, if they ever speak to you again. At 56 I’m bored of this way of operating in the world. But humans always aim for status, they copy each other (peer pressure) to try to get that status. Fitting in is all that makes them feel comfortable. Except it doesn’t, because the ‘in’ changes daily. So they’re continuously anxious. To be fair, this is how humans have always operated. Then it creates catastrophe, like a world war, or a pandemic. And the social status hierarchies get broken. Only then do we set up institutions focused on actually doing the things that society needs doing. But it never lasts, life gets better and we lapse back into social status games. Then more catastrophe. Etc. etc. Scroll your social media feed and you’ll see this process every day, people ‘pitching’ themselves into the collective attention, trying to carve out their status. Or in your workplace. I left CSU when it became wholly and solely this process, on steroids. A once great institution carved up into 5-year CV filler chunks, to further individual careers.

Petrol and diesel cars were the EVs of their day. You have to force the old status quo out.

This person's experience is now shared by millions. There may be no recovery.

Offer people super-cheap, phenomenal quality cars, and guess what? They buy them. Western carmakers are literally asleep at the wheel. https://insideevs.com/news/731206/byd-honda-nissan-sales-volume/?fbclid=IwY2xjawE40vFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVaWYFSEfrMqxqr_9uO2kIMEbCtU6ZUtF1HRnp5XC1wrUsoZSIGdLfN6bw_aem_7sBimmtCqeT2MnkJi8BorA

The most common health advice for people is to exercise, eat well, don’t smoke or drink. But check this. Research shows that people at the lowest rungs of an organisation, with the lowest status, are 4 times more likely to die than those of higher status in the organisation. Even if they have the same health behaviours (what they eat, whether they smoke etc). And it’s even more granular. Amongst those at the top end, a deputy CEO for example is more likely to die than the CEO, even if s/he has the same health behaviours. Nothing is more important to humans than social status, and not just in the workplace. Everywhere. ‘Fitting in.’ It shapes us as deeply physically as mentally. Mean Girls is one of the most important social movements (not just a movie) of recent times, for mine. It targets this explicitly. It includes mothers as well as daughters, recognising these behaviours cross generations. Men are exactly the same, they have their own status games. We never leave high school. The reason everybody gave up fighting Covid was because it became a low status thing to do. Nobody else is doing it, and that’s the number one guiding principle for most people in their lives. What everybody else is doing. If everybody else is wearing a puffy jacket, we wear puffy jackets. If nobody is wearing a mask, we won’t wear a mask. We never leave high school. Similarly EVs are not yet high status, so the old petrol/diesel status hierarchy still prevails. It has absolutely nothing to do with the relative merits of anything. Status kills, much faster than anything else.

BYD is (deliciously) relentless. They're now releasing a hot hatch, the Seal 06 GT.

When you break public health, every pathogen comes for the party.

Forgot my sensible hat today.

We already know how to fix this. If we’d had a government for the past 20 years with even minimal competence, we’d barely need a drop of oil to run the country already.

Public health often uses the same idea of ‘the public’ as shorthand for ‘everybody’. But societies don’t work like that. They run on social status. A tiny handful of people drive behaviours. Take alcohol as an example. We run massive public health campaigns about drinking, and drink driving too. But the actual problem is heavily focused in only a tiny handful of people. This makes it easier to deal with social problems too. Covid is exactly the same, it just needs targeted action at its breeding hubs (mostly schools). Most anti-vax nonsense globally is driven by fewer than 20 online ‘influencers’. Etc.

BYD is absolutely smashing it out of the park in Australia. The pathetic efforts from Western carmakers have been deservedly kicked to the kerb.

What isn’t seen is that by ‘living with’ Covid, we opened the door to everything. Public health was set up about 150 years ago to make us explicitly NOT live with pathogens. Now they’ve all arrived for the party. This is the UK.

Council pounds and animal shelters are overflowing. If you want a pet, please rescue one from one of those locations.

Happy Birthday Rob! Hope you have a wonderful day.

Clever, this stuff. Last time we had high wind warnings the entire street was without power for a whole day. Except us (unashamed schadenfreude there.)

Don’t go there. Just look at the pictures. The English countryside is being turned into a theme park.

On my lunchtime walk today. The tree probably thinking Spring has arrived.

One of the social media sports is to mock the local council about potholes and roadworks. People seriously imagine Council employees come to work every day, and say ‘let’s not fix the roads.’ Like a Council needs ‘shaming’ to do the work. They just need money, moron. There’s a total lack of respect for local councils, going back years. But social media has dramatically accelerated it. People speak to Council workers like they have a brain injury, and they’re a servant.

Another social media favourite when sinking the boot into Council workers would be to have a superior chuckle at the circle of guys just ‘standing around’ while one does all the work. Nobody ever explains how you’d get all 11 men into the ditch at once, or why you’d even want to. They dug the hole, now one guy is working with the pipe or conduit. A much more accurate way to see a picture like this is that it’s the Council in the hole, and that circle is the public standing around doing nothing, offering their opinions to Council and each other on how things should be done, on something they know nothing about. That’s social media in a nutshell.

Again I don't think it's understood just how much trouble we're in. (Edit: this is the ‘heat index’ temperature, the ‘feels like’ temperature you often see in weather forecasts now. It combines the heat plus the humidity.)

Maybe just me, but that cat's eyes say 'you're next buddy if you don't piss off.'

Machattie Park is open again, in full. I’m sure the parks and gardens staff await the applause of the community, ha.

Michael Faraday. One of the great geniuses. Invented the electric motor in 1821. American oil men stole a century from humanity, blocking this wonder while filling the world with noise and pollution.

What we don’t seem to get is that climate change is *infinitely* bigger as a problem, than Hitler. Has anybody noticed their life being disrupted in the way entire societies stopped, to fight Hitler? For 7 years? No. Which means we’re a million miles from the magnitude of action needed. People lived on food rations to beat Hitler. All agriculture as we know it could collapse, under climate change. There’ll be no food to ration.

This may be peak stupid of living with Covid. HOSPITALS now calling an ambulance, to save patients.

Carbon capture and storage and 'carbon offsets' are both bullshit in plain sight. Like nuclear power. None work as solutions to climate change, but corporations and politicians promote them because they allow the fossil fuel industry to avoid doing anything, while looking like something is happening. They're also big donors to politicians.

No matter your day, Doyle Dykes playing Avalon can improve it. https://youtu.be/swW0wbXozoA?si=2E0zxVM_7uL60UmU

A litte something about bats for the social media armchair experts. Yes you can make lots of noise to try to scare them away. You can see what that does in the picture, scares the bats, who all fly around lots, and then come back to land in the same trees. In Sydney when this same approach was tried, sometimes eventually the bats left, but then settled in a neighbouring park instead. It just kicked the can down the road. And it drives bats into peoples' backyards instead of the park. It's better for a town to localise the interruption in this way rather than have it spread all through the town. On top of all that, it's illegal to do it when they're giving birth. It stresses them. There were over 1000 dead baby bats this year. This is a highly endangered, protected species. There is no simple answer, apart from stop destroying their native habitat. That's why they're moving to public parks.

Rooftop (home) solar provided almost half of Australia's electricity during the day last weekend, creating a record low draw of power from the grid. This caused negative prices (they pay you to use electricity), and large solar and wind farms had to be switched off because there was too much grid-level power. Once the large-scale batteries currently under construction are finished, all that energy can be stored for overnight use by the grid.

It's been extremely windy, and you can see that here in South Australia's energy generation for the past 7 days, the wind in green. Yellow is solar. Purple is imports from the national grid, orange is gas. There was more wind power at night than during the day. This is why windmills are so important.

Here's NSW by contrast, for the past 7 days. Obviously daylight hours correspond with the yellow (solar). Black is coal, green is wind, purple is imports from the wider grid, blue is hydro. There's as much or more wind power at night as there is during the day.

The Bathurst 1000 will never be a river of gold for Bathurst Council because it’s not a Council event. Council owns the track, not the event. It gets a track hire fee, but not some enormous cut of the race revenue, which is a huge event paid for and organised by V8 Supercars. Venue owners never, for any event, get huge proportions of the revenue because they’re not organising nor funding the main event. Why is this basic fact so difficult for some to understand. It’s a big earner for Bathurst, the town, with all the visitors. Not for the Council. That’s why Council does it.

With this back in the news this week over the census questions, I thought I’d reshare. There is no ‘LGBTQIA+ community’. It’s a social media fiction.

Reading some of the social media around upcoming LG elections. ‘Councils should be run more like a business’, that’s an old favourite. Councils are nothing like a business. They’re a government. They provide services, all of which cost. Their main revenue is taxes/rates/charges. Without rates and charges, there are no services. Anybody promising low rates and high services is having a lend of you. They may play with funny money by promising to sell lots of things to avoid raising rates. You can only sell things once. It’s not revenue. Or they may try to turn Council into a business to generate the revenue instead. But then its staff aren’t providing services, and are taking business from other businesses. Low rates = low services. That’s it. Invest in your community. Be proud to do it. Ignore social media warriors who couldn’t run a bath, let alone a town. Reality will find them out, if elected. If you think rates are already too high, it means you’re not aware of the services provided, or what they cost to run. Most Councils are millions in arrears in road maintenance just for starters. There’s no money.

Good on Ford for having a red-hot go. EV options are growing very fast now.

We’re starting to see electricity retailers now who offer completely free electricity in the middle of the day. Renewables mean the wholesale price (circled in red) is negative for much of the day now. The retailers get paid to take it from the generators. They make money, giving you free electricity.

Cover the fields AND the car parks. Australian fields are desperately short of shelter for stock and plants.

Human civilisation exists within a very narrow range of temperatures of the past 10,000 years. The trajectory we’re on for climate change will shift that range to levels not seen in nearly 3 million years. Those conditions are incompatible with human life as we know it.

To all the dads today. Being a father is the hardest and most important work a man can ever do. Raising kids is pretty much what life is about. The rest is window dressing.

The cloister is a beautiful architectural invention, seen mostly in old monasteries and also universities, and some schools. (Hogwarts had a cloister.) It’s like an internal verandah, a space between inside and outside, but plays with that because the outside of a cloister is still the inside of the building, a courtyard. Few modern homes internalise their outside space in this way, they tend to have back and/or front yards, if they have a yard at all. But this model allows for complete privacy while still retaining outside space, even in a busy city.